Abstract
The following selected essays explore aspects of the history of mainstream economics, or, as I prefer to call it, for reasons to be made clear, political economy. The study of the history of economic thought has at least one characteristic in common with the economy per se, namely, scarcity. Scarcity is one of the — perhaps the very most important — foundation concepts of economics, and one of its implications is the idea of opportunity cost. Scarcity necessitates choice and the inexorable incurrence of foregone alternatives. The connections between scarcity and opportunity cost are complex but include the following chain: scarcity implies choice, which implies conflict over the choices to be made, the bases of choice, and the nature of the choosing process and its structure. Choices, and corresponding opportunity costs, are therefore specific to the structure of the choosing process. Choices and costs are necessarily political, meaning by political having to do with the exercise of power.
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Notes
Mark Blaug, ‘On the Historiography of Economics’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, vol. 12 (Spring 1990), pp. 27–37. The quotes are from pp. 28 and 29.
See also my introduction to Friedrich von Wieser, The Law of Power, W. E. Kuhn, Translator (Lincoln: Bureau of Business Research, University of Nebraska, 1983).
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© 1992 Warren J. Samuels
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Samuels, W.J. (1992). Introduction. In: Essays in the History of Mainstream Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12266-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12266-0_1
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